Episode 209 (Transcript): Does That Scripture Mean What You Think it Means? Marriage Edition | A Conversation with Dr. Jennifer Bird

Episode Transcript

Many thanks to listener, Christine Fitz, for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app, or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:

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Teaser Intro—

JB: [00:00:00] Those relationships? They didn't call “marriage”. They just talked about it like a man went and took a woman. She's his now. That's it. There was no change of labels. They didn't even have a verb “to marry” in the Hebrew Bible. So we put onto those texts our own current ideas when we call what they're doing “marrying”, or we call it “a marriage”, okay?

But of course, they are pairing up, right? Which is what we do, so it's still the same looking thing. But to me, as a person who's into texts and language, I believe very strongly that labels and the language we do choose to use really are powerful and are important.

EPISODE BEGINS—

CW: Hi, I'm Cynthia Winward.

SH: And I'm Susan Hinckley.

CW: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things. And the title of today's episode is, “Does That Scripture Mean What You Think It Means? Marriage Edition - a conversation with Dr. Jennifer Bird”. Welcome, Jennifer! Thank you for being here.

SH: Hi, Jennifer.

JB: Thank you so much for inviting me to be on; it's really a pleasure.

CW: We are pretty excited to have you on. I don't even know how many pages of notes we have here, but we are happy to have a captive audience to ask all kinds of interesting questions about marriage in the Bible.

So that's what our topic is today. So can you go ahead, Jennifer, and just give us a little bit of a bio about yourself - anything that would help our audience understand what brings you to this topic, about talking about marriage?

JB: Right, yes. The quick and dirty, the quick and easy, quick and something version is I did grow up in a Christian family; not the Mormon church. I was a part of a United Methodist family. And so my whole upbringing - a part of that denomination.

So focusing on this question of marriage, I would want to let people know that when I was in my teens and twenties, I was involved in an organization that was evangelical, an outreach to teens. You may have heard of Young Life, I don't know, but when I was in that phase of my life (for a good biblical seven years or so) I clung very tightly to what I thought the Bible said about anything as my guidance for life. And that applied to my relationships and to what clothes I wore. I even ended up buying baggier clothes when I started dating someone so that my physique wouldn't cause him to stumble, you know, that kind of thing. And I say all these things - this is a part of who I am, right? It's a part of how I got to be who I am. So I don't have any kinds of regrets or any… I'm not embarrassed, right?

But that isn't how I see things anymore. But even on the day of my mother's ordination - she was ordained with the United Methodist Church, which they've been doing for a very long time. I grew up with a female pastor, associate pastor, a couple of them. But when I went into this Young Life, very conservative, almost fundamentalist reading of scripture phase, I shifted my focus and I went to, on the day of my mother's ordination, I turned to her and said, “How can you get ordained, Mom, since it's against God's will for women to be ordained?” Thinking of 1 Timothy 2, right?

That was on her day. I know that maybe not all of the people listening to this are comfortable with women being ordained, but within that tradition, it was totally fine. I had been, and then I swung so conservatively to the right, that I would say this to my mother. On the big day. And what she did was she just told me her story. There was nothing more to say except, “This is what happened,” right? But I try to share that story to show that I am, or I was, just very very much putting scripture first. Even in spite of these very talented people around me, trying to live into their giftings, but it just… “Nope, scripture says this, therefore, you need to adhere to it,” right?

So I guess a few big life moments occurred after that when I was winding up my time on staff with Young Life. So I was at a two year stint and trying to figure out what I was doing next. Someone handed me a paper that put out the theological explanation for women in leadership in the church.

And at the time I agreed with them and it was, contrary to your mother being ordained, I agreed with them that's what scripture says, and they're pulling from Genesis 2 and 3 and all this stuff. Anyway, I also had someone hand me a paper that talked about the Mary and Martha passage in one of the Gospels. Are you familiar with that?

SH: Oh, yes.

JB: Okay. And she [00:05:00] showed me a different way to read that story and in particular what Jesus claims and says at the end that's different from how I had grown up hearing about it. And really still, I don't ever hear anyone refer to it the way this friend showed me how to read it.

And her version said that Jesus looks at Martha and says, basically, “Martha, you're worried about a lot of things.” That Mary chose, essentially, what she wanted is what's important. So the breakdown of that was not that “what she chose was to study at my feet,” but that, “she chose for herself instead of giving into what the patriarchal ideal or standard was for her, which is what you're doing by complaining about her not helping you in the kitchen, right?”

And I don't even know how to explain this. At the time, there was something that opened up in the universe. I was like, “WHAT!?” Jesus just said that women can choose what they want to do?! Like, it just blew my mind and was so freeing and all these different things. So anyway, if that can be seen by looking at the Greek, what else am I missing? Like what else can we see by looking at the original languages? So I ended up going to seminary a couple of years after that and yada yada yada. I cared so much about what the scripture says; I wanted to study it for myself.

So the specific topic of marriage - that started… obviously all along I've cared about what the Bible says about women, right? And what they can or are allowed to do and not to do. And so going to seminary was eye opening for me in the ways that it usually is for most people, which is there are all these things that I've never even considered that I'm now being asked to consider.

But to the point here, I ended up doing a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. And then I went on to Ph.D. work and got my Ph.D. from Vanderbilt. Ph.D. in New Testament, Early Christianity. And my first teaching position right out of graduate school was at a school in North Carolina, Greensboro College, so it was affiliated with the Methodist Church. And while I was there, there was an amendment up for a vote on the state constitution that would in effect, indirectly, define marriage as being between a man and a woman. So the law was about healthcare, but in doing that, it put it into the constitution that marriage is hetero, right?

And so I went to all these sessions, like, “I understand why people care and I understand why this is important to people, but what is going on here? What are you basing your claim that this needs to be defined this way in our state constitution? Where are people coming from?” And I would hear people, both people of faith and people (politically speaking) who would come at this and say “the Bible says,” or “God intends,” or whatever - very vaguely. And I'm like, “That's not what the biblical passage says. I know what you're referring to. That's not what it means.”

So I had this, in the realm of LGBTQ issues, I had this, “Oh my gosh, we need to do some more public general education around this thing.” But also, not on the tail end, but also side by side with that, I had tried to live my life according to biblical standards. And that meant that in the past I had lived in such a way that I would subordinate myself to men - I would do that. And it was biblical to do that. So lots of different pieces of my story kind of feed into, motivate the motivation for this book.

And to be clear, the primary motivation was around the LGBTQ issue, but if you look at the contents of the book, it is more about… I mean, the content (if you're going to talk about marriage in the Bible), it's predominantly about men and women and what that relationship actually looks like, but that, for me, is a part of the bigger picture of, “If we want to look at this collection, the sacred collection, called ‘the Bible’ as our guide, let's be really clear and really honest about what it was saying on its own terms first, and then leave it up to everyone else to figure out what you're going to do with that, because we're going to do different things with it, right?” Getting honest is my gift and let's just be honest about it first, right?

CW: Oh, I'm so glad you got personal there for a minute. It's interesting that so many of our listeners that kind of end up in this space where they're listening to us did so because they had an LGBTQ family member. And so you're not the first person to kinda get triggered by that. Usually it's a child that came out. I have a gay child, but she didn't come out until well after I had this huge faith shift anyway. But for so many, that is the tipping point [00:10:00] for them. Susan, you were going to say something.

SH: Yeah, I was going to say, I love having that personal context of yours for this conversation. And it made me think… could you just give us a little bit of historical context for Christianity generally? Because I'm really interested in how we got so obsessed with marriage, you know? How and when did this happen that Christianity decided, “We're going to take ownership of all of the narrative and all of the practices around this thing, and it's going to be the ultimate big deal.” When and how did that happen?

CW: Tiny question, Jennifer. Tiny question there for you.

JB: Yeah, I'm like, okay, do you understand what you just put out there for me? So let me clarify, just for a moment, that I am a biblical scholar, I'm not a historian. And so I don't have -

SH: I did hear you say Early Christianity, though, in your resume, right?

JB: I did. You’re right, you’re right.

SH: Okay, so here's the thing. Here's what's behind my question. Mormons know a lot about The history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They don't know much at all about the history of Christianity.

JB: Gotcha.